


this of all nights

by fartherfaster



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Christmas Miracles, F/M, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:28:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5436653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the weeks after Ultron, Steve and Maria find comfort in each other, only to find themselves on opposite sides of the Sokovia Protocols. </p><p>-</p><p>Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Paradise Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, tielan!  
>   
> This work was thematically inspired a great deal by the song "Volcano" by Damien Rice and the poem "Detail of the Fire" by Richard Siken. It was beta-read and otherwise manhandled in the eleventh hour by Sarah, to whom I owe a great debt. Thank you.  
>   
> A man with a bandage is in the middle of  
> something.  
> Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a  
> battlefield.  
>   
> Red. And a little more red.  
>   
> Accidents never happen when the room is empty.  
> Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a  
> place.  
>   
> People like to think war means something.  
>   
> What can you learn from your opponent? More  
> than you think.  
> Who will master this love? Love might be the  
> wrong word.  
>   
> Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each  
> other.  
> We know who our enemies are. We know.  
> 

“Hill,” Steve says.

She sighs. There is ash in her hair and blood on her hands. She turns slowly. “Captain,” she says. He takes two steps towards her, and she straightens her posture, wary. Over his shoulder the new Avengers’ facility is bustling; the air between them is quiet.

“Maria,” he says softly. “Where will you go?”

Stark Tower is in shambles, and she doesn’t have the energy to drive the three hours to the city, back to her scarcely lived-in apartment. She shrugs.

“Don’t be alone,” he says, expression cloudy.

Maria pauses, taking in the slope of his shoulders, the crease etched into his brow. He looks like there’s something he won’t let himself say.

“Steve?” she tries.

“I-” He pauses, resolving himself. “I don’t want to be alone right now,” he confesses, “and I don’t think you do, either.”

The air around them is thick and singed with burnt ozone. In the near distance, a helicopter circles. Steve holds out his hand, and Maria accepts a night of peace. The battle isn’t over and the war is far from won, but the captain is an icon of the undefeatable and everlasting. If he can call her to rest, then surely there is a moment when her watch can end – all that matters is that they rise again.

His quarters are spacious and spartan, not unlike what she imagined if she ever confessed to thinking of where Steve lays his head. He props the shield against a stout bookcase; its heavy leather harness he drapes over a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Maria sheds her holsters and weapons neatly on a side table and collapses into an armchair; Steve moves through to an ensuite, and she hears the muted rush of a showerhead. When Maria looks up again he’s leaning on the doorframe, working down the row of fasteners and zips that hold the panels of his body armor together.

“No pressure,” he says. “Your call.” Soot falls from the fabric that hits the floor. Maria leans forward, elbows on her knees. She sweeps a stray lock of hair from her eyes.

“Join me?” he asks.

Her muscles ache for soothing heat, but Maria is weary for some deeper kind of relief. It has been an endless week of violence; the thought of being touched with tender intentions makes something in her chest bloom. She stands, pulling off her gloves and then, as Steve watches unblinking, pulling down the centre zip of her tac suit. Open now to her waist, she walks towards him. Steve persuades the thick fabric to open, works it gently down her arms. He touches her bare shoulder, traces the tip of his index finger down the long column of her throat. Maria catches his hand. Steam from the shower wafts out from behind him and clings to her skin, and when Steve retreats into the bathroom, she follows.

They are in short moments bare to each other under the water; Maria watches his bruises turn to paling shades, deep red scores turn to pink new skin. She drags her hands over his torso; Steve’s tangle into her wet hair. She wonders if it is easier or harder to fight in a body that can’t remember its wounds. When he moves in to kiss her, she pulls back. She cannot decide if he is a figure of permanence or perfection, cannot decide if he is an acceptable risk.

“What is this?” she asks.

“It’s hard to win a war when you forget what it is you’re fighting for.”

“I’m not your Lady Liberty,” Maria says, unyielding.

Steve moves into her space again, this time pressing his lips to hers softly. The water rushing from the showerhead warms her back; he is solid, slick, and warm against her front. Where their chests meet, water clings in twisting rivulets. He pulls back just enough to speak. Maria stares at where the water collects in the hollow of his throat.

“I wish you could see what I see.”

\--

There is a bench in the shower. When the soap and the soot and the blood is all washed away, Steve sits; Maria climbs into his lap, her legs wrapped around his waist. He pulls their bodies flush together. Skin to skin, mouth to mouth, eye to eye; Maria finds parity, security, peace. She trembles, shudders, and lets out a moan, her nails cutting perfect crescents into his biceps. Steve sets his teeth against her shoulder, grips bruisingly on her hips, grunts once, twice, and then stills. She feels the hot rush inside like an echo of the water on her back. Panting into the joint of his shoulder as Steve’s hands move gently and surely over her skin, Maria feels, for a moment, reborn.

\--

Warm and damp, they climb into the bed. Maria presses her nose into the hollow of Steve’s throat until his roaming hands convince her to roll over. He presses in tight along the line of her body, wrapping his arm securely around her waist, his palm cupping one breast and that thumb tracing softly, absently, over the peak of her nipple. Their legs tangle together; Maria sleeps without nightmares for the first time in days, sleeps without waking for the first time since her deployment to Madripoor so many dark years ago.

Steve wakes her with chaste kisses on her nape, his hips restless. The first thrust is smooth, perfect, heady. Maria rolls to her belly; Steve follows, laces their fingers together against the mattress, and then he moves above her like heaven.

\--

Life returns to its own semblance of normal; Maria returns to Stark Industries. Steve, battered, appears at the door to her suite in the Tower with neither announcement nor excuse, and she can see in his posture the same need for respite she saw weeks ago, what he must have seen in her.

“Come in,” she says softly.

He does. He stays.

\--

Maria does not and will not give their act a name. As the weeks become months, as the winter approaches, she can see that word in the shape of his mouth when he comes, can tell exactly what sound lives under the thrum of his heart when he pants and shivers beneath her.

“Maria, I-”

She curls down and kisses him viciously, pulling the word and the thought from his mouth.  She cannot let it escape into the space between their bodies, cannot let it be vulnerable to the war they are built for and surrounded by. They are each the edge of the war monger’s coin, between which, she thinks, there is no room for love.

\--

“Maria.”

She looks up, startled to hear Pepper’s voice so grave. She ought to still be in Johannesburg.

“Stark Industries can’t stall any longer; we have to take a position now or jeopardize more than seventy percent of our contracts. Given how that’s how we fund the Avengers…” she trails off.

“The two have to be mutually compatible,” Maria finishes.

“I can’t-” Pepper starts.

“I don’t expect you to,” Maria says. It comes even more gently than she intended. “I never did. Given the history of the Avengers it was only a matter of time before we came to this sort of divide.”

Pepper sits heavily in the chair opposite Maria. “Do you think Steve and Tony will be able to reach some kind of agreement?” The unspoken question: will the Avengers come to heel? Can a gang of rogues and outcasts, no matter how benevolent, be allowed to act outside authority? There is a line in the sand and the storm surge is building.

Maria’s mouth twists; something cold moves tidal in her chest. “I think it’ll be a war.”

\--

Maria goes to him that night, moving with predatory grace. Steve meets her frenzy with every ounce of fight he has to his name, his blood singing as he moves in her. There is a moment when words fall senseless from her lips like a prayer, and Steve could swear they are oaths of love that rub against his skin.  Maria is sated and silent after; she touches every edge and curve of his body like an act of worship.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her. He knows the political climate is shifting, knows it spells regulation and restriction and will hog-tie him to a chessboard that will cost innocent lives. Steve has tried to talk to Maria about the Registration Act, but he knows Maria doesn’t believe in heroes, certainly doesn’t trust them.

Maria crawls over him, presses her forehead into the back of his shoulder. She clings to him, not crying, but like dazed and quiet like the delirium after a nightmare. He turns out the light and folds her into his arms. “It’s okay,” he soothes her. “We’ll be all right.” He cannot decide if he means the two of them in his bed or all the world; wonders if the former is as bald-faced a lie as the latter. She kisses him once, twice, and then again for every star in the sky. He tries to match her, but it feels paltry, feels like Maria is both blade and lamb and he is only the altar for the wrecked spectacle of her heart.

Steve falls asleep while her cheek is pressed into his chest, his arm curled at the slender bend of her waist. When he wakes in the dark the bed is cold; a feeling like a fishhook catches his gut, and he reaches for the lights. Her toothbrush is still in sight on the en suite countertop; her warm, ratty flannel is mostly kicked under the armchair by the bookcase. But her French novels, her coffee mug, the blank postcard from Guatemala that she says is good luck; all of these benign things are gone, and Steve knows to his last breath that she left in the night.

He waits sleepless until the dawn light slices at the bottom edge of his curtains. As he’s toweling the water from his hair, his phone rings.

“Rogers,” says Natasha on the other side of a number that reads 000-000-0000, “the United Nations and the World Security Council have agreed on a preliminary draft of the Sokovia Protocols for the Avengers to assess and consent to, before the Convention technically goes live.”

“And,” Steve prompts. His voice is cold.

Natasha hesitates for half a breath; he knows he’s supposed to notice. “And we need you to come in. Read it, assess.” She doesn’t say _tell us what to do_. Steve has never assumed that Natasha needed his guidance; never assumed she would take it. He balks, though, at the idea that she might let herself be manipulated by hands so bloody and vulgar. Now is not the time nor place for his questions or the vain thought that the Black Widow would answer him truthfully.

“Half an hour,” he says, and hangs up without another word.

Natasha looks down through the glass walls of his office at the Avengers’ facility at the open space of the hangar where Falcon dodges the flaming vines of Scarlet Witch’s supernatural influence. He spins, graceful, weaving through her maze and climbing until he suddenly folds in his wings and drops like a stone, trusting Maximoff to catch him in a pulsating cushion of red. The demonstration turns something sour in her belly.

“Bozhe moi,” she sighs, shoving her phone into her pocket.


	2. David and Goliath

G8 SUMMIT ON THE SOKOVIA CONVENTION PROTOCOLS TO COMMENCE IN TORONTO

KING OF WAKANDA CONFIRMS LAST-MINUTE ATTENDANCE

\--

“Tomorrow night at nine-eight central the debate hosted by Time magazine will air. A panel of six experts will offer an analysis on the anticipated contents and regulations the new Sokovia Protocols will outline and explain how this will affect America, our military, and the international community.”

“That’s right, Ming-Na. There’s already hot debate in the streets about what this means for superheroes local and international. Join us after the debate, when our in-house political and economic analysts will break down what the results of the Sokovia Convention will mean for the rest of us. Chloe and Clark on our morning program, America AM, will be on-site in Toronto tomorrow. We hope you join them.”

“From BJ and myself, we wish you a very good night. Adrianna Padalicki has the weather; God bless.”

\--

It has been three weeks since Steve woke up to an empty bed. Maria stands on the other side of the conference table, sleek lines and hard eyes backlit by an endless view of the city in unforgiving November sun. At intervals around the table are people he has all called allies in the past; now there are more faces that turn discreetly away than meet his own gaze. Stark is put together in a red, white, and blue three-piece suit; it was either politics by Potts or pettiness by Tony, and Steve can’t settle on which act is more grating.

“The Avengers have to accord themselves with the Sokovia Protocol, Captain. There aren’t any other options. The world cannot abide with a group of rogues serving when and where it pleases them without consequences.”

Wanda and Sam exchange glances on the edge of his vision.

“There are always consequences, Ms. Hill. It’s collateral damage for the safety of the world.”

“Really? The 128 people killed in Johannesburg, 306 in Seoul? That’s an acceptable margin of error?” Her voice raises, she stands tall, and Steve can see where her pulse jumps at the exposed base of her throat.

He stands, leaning in on his knuckles over the massive width of the conference table. “No, it isn’t. There is no room for mistakes when it comes to innocent lives.” Steve levels biting criticism towards her: “I thought someone so personally affected by the fall of SHIELD and the rise of Hydra would have come to better terms with opportunity cost. What happens when Superhuman Registration rots out from the inside, just like SHIELD did? How are we supposed to save the world if we’re wearing shackles?”

There are reactions around the table: Maximoff and Banner pull into themselves; Rhodes and Potts bristle; Barton and Stark slouch like malcontent predators. The Vision and the Widow are both still and unblinking, their expressions wholly unreadable.

“‘Shackles’? We all know how much you love to follow orders, _ Captain _ . You have to be held accountable; I have to do my job.”

“ _ Do your job _ ,” Steve grits his teeth. “Is that what you did when you left-”

“Don’t you dare make this personal.” Hill’s words drop like a bomb.

“Oopsies,” Stark sing-songs. “This wasn’t in the homework packet.”

“Recess,” Potts announces immediately, diplomatic. Banner and Barton are out of the room like shots from a gun; other uneasy pairs move through the double doors more slowly. Stark is corralled out by Rhodes, their speech jumbled and overlapping. Sam pulls the doors closed after sharing a long glance with Steve. In a moment, the room is empty of all but their breathing.

Steve restrains himself and walks around to her side of the table, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“Have you ever,” Steve accuses, “watched the tapes from the Nuremburg Trials, Maria?” His anger is righteous and barely contained and she feels something hot and contorted rise in her throat in response. “The worst evils I’ve ever fought used those exact words to defend themselves! Despite the Avengers’ recent history, Earth’s worst monsters are not the aliens. They’re people who insist they’re  _ just doing their jobs _ .”

Maria feels the rage burn in her gut, swollen and ugly. “Recent history, Captain,” she spits, stepping into his space, “has put a lot of innocent blood on your hands. Fighting the Sokovia Protocol is going to create more enemies than you – than any of the Avengers – can afford.”

The threat in her voice hits him squarely in the chest. “War is always expensive, Hill.” He barely resists the urge to grip her arm and shake sense into her; his hand falls through thin air, bouncing off his thigh.

Maria barks a laugh. “Are you trying to tell me I don’t know what it means?” The figure of Captain America remains undefeated in the national psyche, but she suddenly realizes he has never lived in the twilight of war, has never dealt with the consequences of a final hand. She’d assumed for so long that Steve knew war intimately, and it dawns on her that she’s been wrong this whole time. Steve knows the fight like a dog in a pit; the politics of ruin are her kingdom alone. Madripoor haunts her; Helicarriers tumbling from the sky colour the dark sides of her eyelids. She stands taller, doubly resolved in her convictions.

Steve’s eyes are cold.

She can see in that moment exactly what she loved in him, how it would have failed them both had she not left in the middle of that night. Maria feels her reserve harden, icy at the edges; the same feeling struck her weeks ago, but this time she does not cower for comfort. “People like to imagine that war means something, Captain. I suggest you update your values. The deadline stands; either endorse the Protocols or the World Security Council reserves the right to start arresting superhuman threats.”

Steve’s voice is a whisper. “Is that what I am to you?”

A muscle in her cheek moves to smile like a grimace of bitterness. “When have you ever been anything else, Steve?” she asks softly. “Who are you without a war, Captain America?”

\--

“ _ All hands to appointed stations _ ,” announces a polite, faintly accented voice. Sharon blinks up from her monitor. The lights connected to the fire alarms strobe intensely, though no siren sounds. The voice repeats at even intervals. Sharon pulls her pistol from the lowest drawer of her half-height filing cabinet and, holstering it, walks towards the Operations Debrief room where she always meets  her strike team.

Someone is already speaking as she moves through the open doorway. “Multiple members of the superhero group known as the Avengers have formally gone rogue under the unauthorized leadership of Captain Steve Rogers…”

Sharon’s breath catches. Her supervisor continues to speak, but her mind rushes back to a moment so recent, a moment she never thought she would relive. Another man in a three-piece suit tells her again that Captain America is a fugitive from justice, and again she cannot bear to align herself blindly when her own moral compass points to him.

She turns from the room and does not turn back.

  



	3. Detail of the Fire

The Avengers do not fall apart like flotsam in doomed wreckage. There is bitterness and vicious mutiny and between their opponent leaders, there are the glittering shards of broken love.

\--

How they made it this far without facing each other, Steve doesn’t know. Stark and Sam and Wanda are red-black-red blurs just over the edge of the skyline; Rhodes and Bucky are an endless twist of bright metal; though out of sight, Steve is certain the Widow and the Hawk are coiled into their own deadly and alternating game of cat and mouse. Sharon and the Vision have - for the moment – reconciled: Hulk is loose and raging, unable to master his own warring emotions, and they are in hot pursuit to minimise the damage. In the wrecked wake of him, Steve and Maria stand opposite each other. There is fury on her face – the same rejected and ugly feeling laces itself through his whole body. They are only a handful of paces apart; Maria’s gun is drawn, but it is far from a stalemate.

Steve moves first.

He sends the shield like a discus towards Maria’s wrist; she reacts in time to save the bones but the force wrenches the gun from her grip. She pivots, runs, and flings herself over the carcass of a vehicle while his hands are empty, using the height and momentum to slam her knee into his chest. They both go down and she somersaults out of his grip, slamming her elbow into his throat. Steve rolls, coughing, and is up on his feet and running before Maria can create any distance. She is aware enough to know that her exits are limited, so she acts as she always has in her darkest moments: she flings herself forward in an act of sacrificial faith.

Steve meets her, blocking all of her blows and returning none. The fury builds in her and she screams, turning on him with a roundhouse kick that he catches. She uses his inertia to stabilise herself and in the air quarter-turns, slamming her opposite knee into his chin. They both careen into the asphalt. Maria pushes herself into a recovery roll and pulls her Berretta from its holster at her ankle. Steve is faster. He catches Maria by her throat and pins her against a crumbling brick wall. The muzzle of the gun is pressed tightly up under his ribs.

“Do it,” Steve hisses.

Maria knows he’s not bluffing. Her vision starts to fade at the edges, but she does not move her trigger finger.

“Fight back!” Her voice is ugly and strangled under her palm. She knows if he had really wanted to win – to end this – she would have fallen with the first throw. Maria will not help Steve kill himself. “You don’t get to quit,” she accuses him.

Steve drops her.

“Like you did?”

Maria can’t believe that this is what it comes down to in the middle of a ruined boulevard; that the very fights she tried to unmake come to a head simultaneously. She closes her eyes, fighting the numbness in her legs. “You’ve never played the end-game,” she tells him. “You’ve never seen war through.” When she opens her eyes, her vision swims. “I saw what was coming.”

“I’m really tired of people thinking they know what’s best for me.”

Natasha vaults over an overturned bus, dropping to roll and springing to her feet with both guns drawn on Steve. Her face is as expressive as he’s ever seen it, nothing but betrayal written there. “This really isn’t about you, Steve.”

“If there’s an explanation going, I’m all ears,” Clint interjects. There is a perfunctory arrow nocked and aimed at Natasha, the tip of it glowing purple.

“Says the _deaf man_ , please tell me someone else gets the irony here.” Stark’s repulsors whine as he drops to the asphalt.

“What,” says Clint, bearing a grin of nothing but teeth.

“ _ INCOMING _ ,” Sam roars, catching both Steve and Clint by their shoulder harnesses as he swoops among them. “Big and green and really fuckin’ angry in three, two --” He gains altitude and Steve looks back just as the Hulk flings himself onto the street from shattered skeleton of an office building, his head thrown back and throat open in an anguished scream.

 


	4. The Bible Didn't Mention Us

On Christmas Eve, Steve goes to Midnight Mass.

He hides under the high, turned-up collar of his pea coat, the thick wool of his scarf. Fat flakes clump on his shoulders, falling lazy in the windless night. What’s on the sidewalks crunches softly under his boots, and after the first few blocks away from his home he notices the company of other repentant, fair-weather Catholics. They make a quiet troop; all singles and pairs walking slowly, unfailingly slowly, towards the cathedral with the open doors and tolling bells. Electric candles glow in its windows. A shadow at the door holds out an arm; a hunched, ancient faithful is helped over the threshold.

Steve breathes deeply at the bottom of the stone steps. He fills his chest with the cold, still air, and thinks about walking home. A gloved hand, very gently, jostles his elbow.

“Can’t make up your mind, son?” A man once tall is stooped with age and the weight of dignity. There’s a cluster of snowflakes on his lapel, wilting open like a bloom. The streetlight on the far corner casts a ring of light around his head.

“No,” says Steve, surprising himself. “I haven’t been in a very long time.”

“I think,” the old man smiles, “this night of all nights, you’re forgiven.”

“Maybe.” He tries not to sound weary. “It’s been a  _ very  _ long time.”

“Well,” bustles his companion, “tha’ ain’t for us to decide. I figure your ma raised you good enough to get you this far; I can take you the rest o’ the way. Help an old feller up these steps.”

“Yes, sir,” says Steve, holding out his palm to be met with a tight, arthritic grip. “I’ll take the help I can get.” They move up the steps one by one; his shepherd limps, and Steve wonders absently how alone he made it so far.

\--

He crunches home, quietly alone. The snow falls thicker, muting the world. Steve tries to listen to the choir in his memory instead of the steady rush in his ears. The cold drags icy fingers down the back of his neck, burns brightly on the shells of his ears, his exposed fingers; for a moment he longs to fold down and sleep. The last time this feeling washed over him, he had a sense of a justified end – now he’s just a tired soldier. Steve wonders, fleetingly, if they will ask him to die for his country again.

Under the endless beat of his heart, someone else’s boots crunch in the snow.

It was foolish of him to go out; downright thickheaded to think think that the senator wouldn’t have eyes on his apartment, that all and sundry agencies wouldn’t close in at any chance. Steve stops walking, and the footsteps stop. He lets out a long breath; feels remorse, impotent anger, and a weak, hopeless kind of relief. He wonders if they’ll kill him outright, prefers that idea to being taken in. The dog and pony show is over; the curtain gone up months ago. Christmas Eve, he thinks, is not the night for false idols.

“Steve.”

Of all people, it is Maria standing in his shadow. His gaze skitters around the empty street, searching through the snowflakes to see the rest of her team, the glint off the metal torsos of Stark’s drones. There is no wind and no sound but their breathing.

Maria quarter-turns on her heel, quizzing the dark street. She turns back to Steve, the corner of her mouth turned-up, cynical. “I’m alone,” she tells him.

“Forgive me for being suspicious,” he says drily.

Maria concedes a nod; the clouds of their breath disintegrate above their heads. She stuffs her hands more firmly into her pockets and then continues to walk; her shoulder skims under Steve’s elbow as she passes him, and he follows her with his eyes.

“Not your style to follow,” she calls into the snow.

Steve tucks his chin into the fold of his scarf and uses the benefit of his longer stride to catch her; he doesn’t like the idea that she’s dawdling, waiting for him. He’s too proud to ask Maria what on Earth she thinks she’s doing here, too stubborn to be the first to break the quiet. Steve wants, vainly, to see her as nothing more than an ally turned traitor, but the Sokovia Protocol and the Superhero Registration Act are too complicated for that kind of reduction. He admired Maria’s tenacity and intelligence when he thought he loved her; Steve cannot bring himself to think her unworthy only for disagreeing with him. Anger and resentment and the spiteful whiplash of rejection curl cold in his belly, twisting tight and bitter for everything she represents – denied and lost and dangerous – and maybe coiling tighter because he still cannot disrespect her for it. Neither leads nor follows, and they arrive at the snowy stoop of his brownstone without another word between them. Steve unlocks the door and disarms its alarm; he doesn’t hold it open for Maria, but he doesn’t slam it in her face, either.

They toe out of their boots; Maria, standing closer to the foyer closet, hangs both coats. Steve moves into the kitchen and puts the kettle on the stove. Maria sits on a barstool on one side of the kitchen island and folds her chilled hands between her knees. Steve pulls one mug and then another from an upper cabinet; the second he puts down with too-weakly-restrained strength and it gives into half a dozen uneven fragments, the ceramic skittering and noisy on the countertop. Maria disguises her flinch by sweeping imaginary fringe from her eyes. Steve’s eyes are closed and his fist tenses in rhythm with his breathing for a five count before he looks at her, apparently unruffled. He props his hip against the countertop and sighs.

“Maria,” he says eventually. “What are you here for?”

“I want to be with someone who loves me,” she confesses. “Call it a Christmas miracle.”

“Second one tonight,” Steve says, dry. “Will wonders never cease.” Maria looks at him, and Steve counts his heartbeats. “I never told you,” he says.

Maria leans into the island, hiding her face in her hands for a moment. When she looks up, she says: “You didn’t need to.”

“What,” Steve’s voice is sharp. “Was it written all over my face? Tell me, Maria, if you’re in the mood to confess: did that make it easier to leave; you were  _ frightened _ ? God knows you won’t walk away from a fight, but if I had had the audacity to tell you I loved you?... I know you would’ve taken the fuck off in the middle of the night – oh, wait! That’s exactly what you did!”

“I’m not here to fight.” Maria’s voice falls like a pin-drop in the quiet. Steve’s breath is harsh, the violence gone out of him in a rush.

“I always knew,” she continues. Steve sags opposite her, folding his arms across the granite and laying his forehead down. “I thought you did, too. I thought you understood why I couldn’t say it.”

“Never been smooth with a dame in charge,” Steve mumbles into the countertop.

“Jesus Christ,” Maria sighs. “If you could crawl out of that hole of self-pity, it would be really helpful.”

Steve straightens up, squaring his shoulders. Maria feels suddenly heady and small. “Lord’s name,” he admonishes, blinking and distracted. “It’s Christmas.”

Maria slips off the barstool and circles around the island. Steve braces his hand on the counter, turning to face her. Maria puts her hands on his knees and bows her head, just slightly. “I’m only asking for one thing,” she says. “Just for one night. I-” Her voice doesn’t crack, but it’s a near thing. “I never said goodbye and I can’t forgive myself for that. But I…” She runs out of things things to say, or her courage dries up; Steve can’t tell.

He reaches out, holds her lithe waist in both hands, and rests his forehead on her shoulder. “This isn’t fair, Maria.”

She sighs, leaning in to him. “I know.”

\--

Maria takes Steve by the hand and leads him to his bedroom without a backward glance. The lights are down; the thick snowfall scatters the orange glow of the streetlight into an otherworld brightness that shows through the gap in the curtains. Steve stops, placing his hands on Maria’s hips before she can turn to look at him. The bed is only one more step away, but he hovers at her back, breathes across the exposed nape of her neck. Maria waits in perfect stillness.

He presses his brow for a moment into the line of her shoulder, drags his lips so lightly against the side of her throat. His fingertips find her wrists, painting patterns up and down the length of her arms before he steps in closer behind her. Maria sighs, leaning into the heat of him. Steve presses almost-kisses on the tender skin behind each of her ears, drags his fingers to the front of her shoulders, skids his palms down her sides before he stops, restless, at the hem of her shirt. Maria pushes against the heels of his hands where they balance perfectly on the ridges of her hips. Her heart thunders; she feels awareness skitter under her skin like electricity. Steve, huge behind her, breathes so slowly. One thumb flicks under the edge of her shirt and he skates his palm up beneath it, skin to skin on her belly.

Maria breathes, and Steve moves, ceaseless and slow and smooth. Her shirt, her bra; his hands, his artist’s hand, skim over the catch on her slacks and they fall with a whisper down her legs. Maria moves to step out of them but gets no further than shifting her weight – Steve presses two fingers into her hip, asking-telling-pleading her to stay still. He still hasn’t made a sound. His bedroom is lit only by the streetlight and the snow and if she didn’t feel so alive Maria would swear she’s dreaming. In the summer, she had dreams like this.

Steve curls his fingers under her palm, gently suspending her arm. His other traces up the length of it, crossing her shoulders back and forth, bumping up and down the curve of her spine. He holds her hand in his own, wrapping both of their arms across her ribs and pulling their torsos together. Maria sighs, closes her eyes. It’s impossible, she thinks. These bodies were made for war; how dare he touch her with love? She drops her head back against his chest. He is warm, solid and still. Steve pulls the hidden clip from the inside whorl of her French twist and tosses it into her discarded clothing, soundless.

Steve curls around her and Maria leans with him. His warm palm feels huge against her back and between his hands he guides her forward. His bed is tall; indulgent and massive in a way she once thought outside of his character. Steve stretches their joint arms out against the silky duvet cover, flattens her palm beneath his own. His free hand catches hers and makes a mirroring motion; Maria bears her weight on arms from elbows to palms. Behind her, Steve sinks to his knees.

He delicately touches each of her ankles, stripping away her socks; they and her slacks are shoved away blindly. Both warm palms move smooth and slow up her calves, the length of her thighs. His fingertips stop at the scalloped edge of black lace. His brow is pressed into the dip of her spine; his lips move over her skin and Maria waits, her breath held in her chest as she strains to hear him in the silence.

“Maria.”

Her name is a plea and a question, prayer and resignation. She breathes and trembles and waits for the dream to break.

“Maria, please,” Steve begs. Two sudden drops slip down the lowest slope of her back. She comes back to reality on the crack in his voice. The war has only just begun and they have already lost so much; this night of all nights, Maria thinks, is theirs to take rightfully.

“Yes,” she sighs.

Steve wetly kisses the dimples on her back; Maria folds herself more sharply at her hips as he gently, so gently, tugs away the fabric of her panties. Bare before him and trembling with anticipation, Maria sucks in a breath when his thumbs drag on the creases of her thighs. Her sighing exhale stutters when one fingertip touches her wetness; her voice escapes in a thin staccato when he adds a second fingertip, moving so gently down the length of her sex to circle her clitoris.

“Maria,” he whispers. His breath clings warmly to the delicate inside of her thigh; his fingers slip away from her skin and he presses the lightest kiss in their place.

Heat moves through her like a wave. Steve grips her thighs, his thumbs holding apart her labia carefully, tenderly. Maria feels strung-out and hungry, her skin too tight where he doesn’t touch her. Steve drags the point of his tongue against her clitoris before sucking it between his lips; his palm skates up the curve of her ass and he pushes first one finger and then another into her heat. Maria whines into the bedspread. Without his grip, she pulls one knee up, over the edge of the mattress. Steve shoulders into the space created and works a third finger into her. Her voice moves with her breath, harsh pants with sharp edges scarcely muted. Steve hears the catch in her breathing, feels the shivers in the strong muscles of her thigh. He works his tongue slow and firm over her clitoris, curls and uncurls his fingers inside her in an undulating wave.

His balls feel heavy and tight, his cock straining against his jeans; he feels hungry for her orgasm more keenly than his own. He sucks off her clitoris with a wet sound, his thumb moving over her with an intensity that leaves her shaking, so close to her edge.

“Maria, honey,” he begs, “let me feel you. C’mon.” He leans in again, licking over skin stretched and tender.

Maria shakes, lip caught between her teeth as she fights to hold on to her composure. “Honey,” Steve’s lips move over her; she can feel her wetness drip down her thighs. “Let go,” he tells her.

“Oh,” Maria’s voice goes without her, her orgasm opening like a bloom. “ _ Steve _ ,” she sighs, “I, I-” It crests within her and Maria’s mind goes quiet, bright, holy.

Steve slows down, pulls his hand out and away from her so gently as her tremors fade. He presses soft, open kisses over all the skin he can reach as he catches his breath. Distracted, he wipes the remnant damp from his fingers against the denim over his thigh, running his palm up and down the length of her extended leg.

Maria comes back to herself, mumbling into the bedspread. She swipes at the strands of hair that cling to her mouth and eyelashes and then crawls up the bed, rolling onto her back with a deep sigh. She blinks, watching as Steve stands.

“Hi,” she says quietly.

“Okay?” Steve asks.

Maria closes her eyes, nodding. She feels open and spent and frighteningly exposed, like Steve can see so much more than just skin and soul. She wonders absently if her body is beautiful to his artist’s sense, or if the angles of her are pleasing in the simple way efficiency is pleasing.

“What do you see?” she asks him, her eyes still closed. When he doesn’t answer in the space of several breaths, she opens her eyes.

There is something naked and hungry in his expression. “I want-” he says, swallows, waits.

Maria spreads her thighs, flexes deeply into the upward curve of her spine. Her muscles are tired and warm; she feels sated but longs for the press of skin against hers. It has been exhausting months since she last felt the weight of him above her. “I told you,” she says quietly, “tonight I want to be loved.”

Steve, methodical and steady, strips out of his clothes. In the glow from the snow and the streetlight, he stands like a statue of marble; an artist’s perfectly-rendered Hercules, heartbroken and battlebound.

He crawls over her; Maria curls her knees up over his hips, wraps her arms across his back. Above her Steve moves geologic, huge and undeniable. He presses into her body and Maria sighs, arches, gives. Settled against her, Steve waits for her nod. Maria traces her fingertips across the muscles of his shoulders.

“I have loved you.” His lips move just a breath above hers. “I do.”

Maria curls around his body, pulling him deeper, more tightly flush skin-to-skin. “I know,” she sighs. She weaves the fingers of one hand into the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him in to kiss for the first time in months. When they part for breath Maria feels mad for movement, her hips rocking restlessly. “Please,” she asks, arching high into the weight of him.

Steve thrusts into her, his own eyes closing. “I know,” he repeats. “I know.”

\--

Steve pretends to doze, his cheek resting on the ridge of Maria’s hip, his palm curling over her thigh. She cards her fingers through his hair, up and down the nape of his neck, across the heavy, massive stretch of his shoulder. She knows there are knives under both pillows. She dwells on the myth of Samson and wishes deeply that it was only a matter of cutting a lock of his hair to end their war, wishes that Steve could be a man instead of an icon.

“All’s fair,” Steve mumbles into her skin.

“What?”

“All’s fair in love and war,” he tells her, giving a name to the bed they’ve made. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says more clearly. “Can’t even say I didn’t think the same thing.”

“Not tonight,” says Maria. “Christmas truce.”

“That was three days,” Steve points out, “in 1914. I thought you were more interested in recent history.”

“They resumed fighting on orders from above.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to Mass,” Steve muses, sarcastic.

“You’re forgiven,” Maria laughs. “This of all nights, you’re forgiven.”


End file.
